Garmin Venu Gets a New Look and Plenty of Functionality

Garmin is dressing up its watches with a bright AMOLED display for its new Garmin Venu. What you need to know is that The Venu is essentially everything you love about the Vivoactive 4, just better looking.

So why an AMOLED display? Mainly it just dresses up the watch quite a bit, taking it from the more Spartan screen of the Vivoactive and into the realm of something that is intriguing to look at. Granted, the use of an AMOLED display does eat up quite a bit of juice, but you still get a five day battery life out of the Venu with each charge when it’s in smartwatch mode. If you put it into GPS mode with music, you can expect to get about six hours of life.

Speaking of music, you can load music directly to your watch for phone-free listening while you’re working out. Those downloads include your playlists from services like Spotify, Deezer, or Amazon Music. Just connect with wireless headphones and you’re free of your phone. When you do have your phone with you, you can view emails and texts on the watch and receive alerts. And if you have an Android phone, you can even respond to texts using Venu. In addition to music and phone connectivity, Venu comes with Garmin Pay so that you can “breeze through checkout lines,” as well as Garmin Coach, which is “a personal running coach on your wrist.” Using the Connect IQ Store, you can download apps, widgets, watch faces and more to your watch. Finally, there are interchangeable bands that mix up the watch’s looks and it is water rated to 5 STM.

What might be most exciting about the watch, however, is the amount of things that you can track with it. Venu features Body Battery Energy Monitoring, Respiration Tracking, blood-oxygen levels with its Pulse Ox Sensor, Advanced Sleep Monitoring, Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Stress Tracking, Hydration Tracking, and the obligatory Heart Rate. It also provides animated cardio, strength, yoga, and Pilates workouts. This is the watch that’s going to help get you healthy—all while looking great with that AMOLED screen.